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Sunday, April 8, 2018

I collected $51.38 in dividend incomein February. SDIV continues to pay out good monthly dividends while VZ, T, and GIS have become part of my core holdings. I can't wait to see these grow over the next years. Keep an eye out for my March dividend income soon! As well as a recent buy!

I'm not an investment professional or a licensed financial advisor. This blog represents my personal views and decisions, which may not be appropriate for other investors. Please use common sense or consult with an investment professional before investing your money. I am not responsible for the outcomes of your decisions, nor am I responsible for the comments posted by readers or the contents of any linked websites. This blog should viewed for educational or entertainment purposes only.

Wednesday, April 4, 2018

Here is a very late post on my dividend income. Hopefully, I will be all caught up in a few weeks. I collected $155.23 in dividend incomein January! The majority of this is due to my Fundrise dividend which has grown to be pretty significant compared to my other positions. I have not really been making any trades except for reinvesting my dividends. Regardless, I expect my income to grow in 2018 despite less money in the market. Hope you all had a great first quarter of 2018! Look forward to an exciting year and be on the lookout for my February and March dividend income!

I'm not an investment professional or a licensed financial advisor. This blog represents my personal views and decisions, which may not be appropriate for other investors. Please use common sense or consult with an investment professional before investing your money. I am not responsible for the outcomes of your decisions, nor am I responsible for the comments posted by readers or the contents of any linked websites. This blog should viewed for educational or entertainment purposes only.

Thursday, January 18, 2018

One of my goals for 2018 is to read at least one book per month. I will definitely be reading some investing books as well, but the first one I picked for the new year was The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis.

Why did I pick this book?
Michael Lewis is easily one of the most popular and easy to read authors of our time. Having read and watched both Moneyball and The Big Short and loving every minute of it, there was no way I wasn't going to read this book!

What is it about?
The book follows two psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky who couldn't be more different, but somehow create a bond unlike any other. They study human decision making and all of the errors we making when we want to make a decision not only based on numbers but also a story or by following our "gut." The further explored decisions based on risk and reward and all of the various outcomes that could arise due to inherent biases which we may not be aware of. Their work together resulted in Daniel Kahneman winning the Nobel Prize in Economics. Who knew how this book could be to investing?! It is quite interesting, in my opinion, to study behavioral psychology especially since it DOES relate to investing behavior. How many times have we bought shares of a company because of what we thought was going to happen and how great of a history a company has had. It has to recover right? Are we really taking a close look at the financial statements the company has put out and following the trend to determine if a company is a good bet or not? We can easily frame our decision in a way that makes it seem more favorable without even knowing it!

My rating:
I give the book a 3/5. The intro to the book discussing sports and the Houston Rockets had me hooked and I had set my expectations at Moneyball and The Big Short level, but I was a little let down. This is partially due to the fact that two topics I am very passionate about include sports and markets, while this was on psychology. I do enjoy learning about psychology but the mix of that and biography did not sit well with me. It was nowhere close to my favorite books written by Michael Lewis. Don't get me wrong, it's a well written book on an intriguing topic (behavioral economics) packed with some interesting scenarios and unlikely life stories, but most of the book had me yearning for more and a little bit bored.

Favorite quotes from the book?

“Confirmation bias,” he’d heard this called. The human mind was just bad at seeing things it did not expect to see, and a bit too eager to see what it expected to see. “Confirmation bias is the most insidious because you don’t even realize it is happening,” he said"

“It is sometimes easier to make the world a better place than to prove you have made the world a better place.”

Saturday, January 13, 2018

Hope you are all doing well! It has been quite some time since my last post. The market has just been chugging along during this time! I am happy to have maxed out my 401(k), HSA, and Roth IRA for 2017 (all of which I do not show in this dividend portfolio). So overall even though I did not meet all the goals I set out for last year it was quite successful. I also stopped making weekly trades (even the automated ones since Loyal3 went bye bye) so it was nice to see I was just able to step away from looking at the market every day and enjoy the dividends rolling in. Despite selling about half of my portfolio in May/June of 2017 I was still able to increase my dividend income compared to 2016 by about 37%!!! My total 2017 dividend income ended up being $867.70 and my ending portfolio value for December 2017 was almost $27,000. Fundrise has been a great source of additional income for me which I just reinvest into the eREITs. You will see below my best months were the ones that I received both Fundrise and FUSEX dividends. I even started to dip my toes in selling puts to build my portfolio/generate extra income. This is something I may write about in the future or at least post my results on here! I expect 2018 to be even better and the snowball starts turning and will try to post at least monthly about my dividend income!

#SlowandSteady

-TDM

Full Disclosure: Long FUSEX, ALL HOLDINGS IN MY PORTFOLIO

I'm not an investment professional or a licensed financial advisor. This blog represents my personal views and decisions, which may not be appropriate for other investors. Please use common sense or consult with an investment professional before investing your money. I am not responsible for the outcomes of your decisions, nor am I responsible for the comments posted by readers or the contents of any linked websites. This blog should viewed for educational or entertainment purposes only.

Friday, August 11, 2017

As you noticed it has been a long time since I last posted. Ever since Loyal3 closed its back in May I lost my primary method of buying shares of stock. I guess thats the downside of not investing with a large brokerage as I learned the hard way. I did not want to start using the Folio Investing platform that they planned to move to as it charged a $5 monthly charge. Looking back it may have been the way to go. Instead I sold all of my Loyal3 holdings and held it in cash.

I took many steps over the past few months getting closer to the core portfolio that I wanted. You can follow this link to see my current portfolio: Portfolio. Life has also been very busy lately and I have realized I need to reevaluate my investing goals and set more realistic goals so that I do not need to reach back into my investment account to pay for large purchases.

Although my portfolio is much smaller than earlier in the year. I have now began to work towards maxing out my 401(k), HSA, and Roth IRA (which I do not plan to show on this blog). I have a portfolio yield of over 3.5% and come within a few hundred dollars of my projected dividend income from the beginning of the year despite using only half of the funds to get there. I hope to post here and there if I make any changes until I can get this site back to where I want it and set my goals properly. Until then lets enjoy this market ride up!

I'm not an investment professional or a licensed financial advisor. This blog represents my personal views and decisions, which may not be appropriate for other investors. Please use common sense or consult with an investment professional before investing your money. I am not responsible for the outcomes of your decisions, nor am I responsible for the comments posted by readers or the contents of any linked websites. This blog should viewed for educational or entertainment purposes only.

I'm not an investment professional or a licensed financial advisor. This blog represents my personal views and decisions, which may not be appropriate for other investors. Please use common sense or consult with an investment professional before investing your money. I am not responsible for the outcomes of your decisions, nor am I responsible for the comments posted by readers or the contents of any linked websites. This blog should viewed for educational or entertainment purposes only.

Saturday, April 8, 2017

I sold 100 shares of BX (Blackstone) for a total loss of $175.40. This is a move I made for a few reasons. One is due to working towards that "strong core portfolio." The other is to avoid K-1's during tax season. In the future, any partnership I invest in will be in a retirement account. It's just not worth the hassle for me to wait for K-1s to come out and then attempt to understand everything in them.

My loss on the sale was $419 from which I received $243.75 in dividends in the past two years. For a net loss of $175.40. For those of you investing in partnerships you may know that this $243.75 is not all treated as as a dividend at all and rather treated as a withdrawal on the k-1 so in reality the gain/loss may vary from the $175.40. This is something I will have to calculate when the 2017 K-1 is released next April. Although the dividends were solid and I see it as a great company in the long run. It does not belong in my portfolio and not worth the administrative tasks for me personally. I have about $3k in cash now to deploy when needed. The volatility in my portfolio remains high as I patiently work towards having a strong core portfolio while growing my dividends. This will definitely take a hit to my annual dividends, but I hope to deploy the money in a favorable manner into companies that don't affect my sleep at all. Been a while since a sale, but happy with the move!

I'm not an investment professional or a licensed financial advisor. This blog represents my personal views and decisions, which may not be appropriate for other investors. Please use common sense or consult with an investment professional before investing your money. I am not responsible for the outcomes of your decisions, nor am I responsible for the comments posted by readers or the contents of any linked websites. This blog should viewed for educational or entertainment purposes only.

I'm not an investment professional or a licensed financial advisor. This blog represents my personal views and decisions, which may not be appropriate for other investors. Please use common sense or consult with an investment professional before investing your money. I am not responsible for the outcomes of your decisions, nor am I responsible for the comments posted by readers or the contents of any linked websites. This blog should viewed for educational or entertainment purposes only.

Tuesday, April 4, 2017

March 20 - March 26March is gearing up to be a pretty quiet month for me. I had skipped my automatic investments for this week as I had deployed additional capital as I watched VFC and TGT drop in previous weeks. This marks 64 consecutive weeks without paying commissions on my purchases!

I'm not an investment professional or a licensed financial advisor. This blog represents my personal views and decisions, which may not be appropriate for other investors. Please use common sense or consult with an investment professional before investing your money. I am not responsible for the outcomes of your decisions, nor am I responsible for the comments posted by readers or the contents of any linked websites. This blog should viewed for educational or entertainment purposes only.

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TheDividendMogul.com is a personal web blog. I am not a licensed investment advisors or professionals. The information on this website should not be used in any actual transaction without the advice and guidance of a professional Tax Adviser who is familiar with all the relevant facts. This blog represents my personal views and decisions, which may not be appropriate for other investors. This site should be viewed for educational and/or entertainment purposes only. I am not liable for any losses suffered by any parties. I am not responsible for the outcomes of your decisions, nor am I responsible for the comments posted by readers or the contents of any linked websites. This blog should viewed for educational or entertainment purposes only. Unless your investments are FDIC insured, they may decline in value. Please consult with an investment professional and/or tax professional before investing any of your money. Any transactions we publish are not recommendations to buy or sell any securities.

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